Tips for Expanding Your Testing Toolbox Prior Year Content

Regardless of how long you’ve been testing and learning—only a month or many years—there is always something new to help improve your testing and software development efforts. Although many testers, for better or worse, see test automation as their next—and sometimes only—step to grow their skill set and improve as a tester, there is much more to do. Alan Page discusses, demonstrates, and details concepts and tools that can help everyone test better and provide noticeable technical value to their organization. Alan explores a potpourri of suggestions to help you grow your testing toolbox: techniques for security and performance testing, tools to help you find better bugs, scripting that aids (rather than replaces) your testing, tester tips for code review that can be done with minimal (or zero) knowledge of coding, and more. Finally, you’ll learn simple approaches that will enable you to continue to grow your knowledge and skills throughout your career.

Alan Page is a principal SDET—a fancy name for tester—on the Xbox console team at Microsoft. Edging up on twenty years in software testing, Alan has previously worked on a variety of Microsoft products including Windows, Windows CE, Internet Explorer, and Office Lync. He spent some time as Microsoft’s director of test excellence where he developed and ran technical training programs for testers throughout the company. Alan was the lead author of How We Test Software at Microsoft and contributed chapters on large-scale test automation to Beautiful Testing and Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation. You can follow Alan on his blog or on Twitter @alanpage.